


It Doesn't Have to Hurt

by Anam_Writes



Series: the things you can't read aloud at the war table [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: After care, Comfort, Dom Claude von Riegan, Dom Drop, F/M, Fluff, Kink Negotiation, Light BDSM, Post-Canon, Post-Time Skip, Riding Crops, Sub Byleth Eisner
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:14:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23415130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anam_Writes/pseuds/Anam_Writes
Summary: Claude meditates on his desires and what he is and isn't willing to do for his wife. Or himself.And what is this uncomfortable drop in his stomache he gets whenever he enjoys this?
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: the things you can't read aloud at the war table [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684297
Comments: 10
Kudos: 121





	It Doesn't Have to Hurt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maddy02](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maddy02/gifts).



> Prequel to a bigger story coming out soon. Split into two chapters cause my demisexualness is really not letting me think about smut without laughing right now.

Claude called himself a dreamer.

His wife disagreed. Byleth called him a builder. She took his hands in hers, turned them over, palms to the sky. She left kisses on the red, worn skin. With these hands he made all he dreamt real: in word and stone, flesh and spirit. 

He knew she meant well. He knew she was proud; proud their labours bore such fruit, that they could crush the product and leave it to ferment. One day their children may be grown and able to taste the wine. 

But there were other dreams that filled Claude’s head. They could not be as word and stone. As flesh and spirit - he took a breath of cool air in - he’d not allow them to materialize. 

It was odd to him that he could want something so contrary to that which lay closest to him. 

Byleth - his partner, his friend, his lover - was strong, intelligent, willful, dangerous. It was not in spite of these traits that he loved her; they had drawn him in like a flare. They were the mark of something grand, new, helpless and terrifying hiding in deep terrain he’d have to trek. 

His ideals - a world with liberty of the personal and collective kind, without restrictions, borders or dogma - were simple enough to understand. He’d been a boy when he’d conceived of them. Only just a man when he refined them. 

But now he was King of joined nations. He was building the structures necessary for those nations to outlive him. He implemented liberty and added his wife’s skills to his own. And the dreams he had now did not hint at the man he was awake. 

In them she was soft, docile. She was not independent of him but a joined thing; she needed him. Claude, always the resourceful man with a bevy of exit strategies, had none; he needed her. It was horrifying beyond all measure. At least it should have been. 

When he woke his sweat was there but not cold. His breath was caught a moment but he was not gasping. He was hard, usually, but not in the way waking blood made one feel so. 

Once he had woken in the middle of the night to see he had spent himself in the sheets. He moved lightly as he could and to this day he's unsure whether Byleth had seen him clean his mess or not. She was remarkably good at lying still and silent in the face of anything. 

Such observations fueled the pit more. What would it take to break her into pieces beneath him? How delicious would it be to put her back together again? Would she let him? Trust him to do what had to be done to take her to heights gone unexplored?

It crossed his mind, every once in a while, what might make her squirm. Predicting what she'd like best was a more engaging challenge though. The possibilities were endless: rope, leather, wax, chaim, silk. So many promising materials. And he could have the finest of it all commissioned into anything he desired for her. He did not lack the resources for pleasing his lady. 

All the same he kept those thoughts in the depth of his mind. Byleth tied up with a desperate plea on her lips and watery eyes was something that surely was too repugnant to allow. 

He did not want to restrain her, to hurt her, to deprive her of any desire in their life together. So why did some primal part of his brain keep obsessing over the prospect?

He tried to work them off by himself, hunched over some erotic instruction or another on the subject, looted from the depths of Seteth's old vault.

He'd read a multitude of treatises on the subject, some novels too. He found that the informative ones piqued him the most. The ones outlining the methodology behind tying the knots, creating the space, setting the scene, keeping your lover safe. 

They had pictures too. Pictures that made it that much clearer in his mind everything he wanted to do to Byleth. 

He felt juvenile. He felt wrong. 

He felt he must be a temperamental boy wanting to impose his will on a wife he - was undeserving of - all because he had a wet dream. 

Sitting beneath the young pine he had rooted in the Derdriu Palace garden, Claude tried to keep his mind steady. 

He wasn't here to think only of himself, of his recently discovered predilections. 

No, he was on his knees - eyes closed, fire set and burning small before him - to meditate on Byleth. What she wanted. What she asked of him. 

She had come to him so sweetly. She had taken his hand while he was at work in the study and guided him back to their rooms. 

She kissed him as softly as alway and asked against his lips if he would try something. She'd assured him it would please her. 

He told her yes. Of course he did. He wanted to provide her every indulgence he could. So hard was her fight, so long her turmoil. Did she not deserve everything in his power to give?

That's when she brought it out from a box hid beneath the sofa. Inside a smooth wood artisan box lay a finely made black crop. He could tell it was new: the leather was crisp, the material still hard. It could use some wearing in. 

"I don't need gifts for making you happy, you know?" He chuckled, taking the crop in hand anyhow. 

"It's not for you to use riding horses," Byleth said. "It's for you to use with me."

He called her darling, told her he'd consider it. And three days later he was here beneath the pine. Still considering. 

She'd need an answer eventually, he knew. So he could not avoid it much longer. He needed to identify the questions that needed asking. 

Did she want this? Yes, it would seem. 

He checked the place he kept his collection and found it still secured. He read reports on court gossip and came up with nothing that would have influenced his wife to take an interest in the subject for his sake. He even spoke with the artisans he'd spoken with - the ones that intense curiosity had brought him to - and found the Queen or their acquaintances met with not a single one of them to discover his previous inquests. 

What exactly was she asking for? For him to use a crop. 

Such things had been the least pleasant sections on what he had read on the topic. Imagining beating his wife - something twisted in his gut. 

Another word then.

Hitting. Striking. 

No. None sat better in his body than the other. 

Odd, the analytical part of himself took note. If he agreed and took a crop to Byleth it would not be the first time he had hit her. 

He shuddered.

Training was different. They did so to prepare for battle, to survive, to remain ready. 

And is that why they laughed? Is that why, when Byleth struck him so hard that the bruise on his back was green even after Manuela had healed him, he brushed it off easily with a smile? Is that why they still sparred like they were kittens play-fighting in an alley? Preparations, survival and readiness had little to do with it. 

So what was it then, weighing on his mind and tearing through his nerves? Dogma?

Claude had never been one for traditional approaches for their own sake and yet…

Logically, there seemed to be little reason not to allow himself pleasure in his bed, and in so doing to please Byleth as well. Meaning whatever the true issue there was did not lay with the play itself but with him. 

Claude opened his eyes, sighed, and dumped water on the fire. 

It might have been past the time he should speak to his wife. 

…

“You’ve gotten better at making tea blends,” Byleth said, breathing in the aroma of his latest attempt at perfecting the Almyran Pine blend. 

He had needles sent from the east of the Throat and had mixed it with ginger - something calming and cleansing. The last time he tried that he had put far too much ginger in and the smell was overpowering. Just like any chemistry he did with his poisons it was all study, prep, trial and error to get the right outcome. 

“I’m glad you like it,” he took a sip. “Though, I have to admit, trying the blend isn’t the only reason I pulled you away for a break.”

“Ah,” Byleth looked up at him through green lashes that looked almost white in the sunlight pouring through the sitting room’s window. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I’m not frightened.” He left the ‘by you’ unsaid. "But I have to be honest with you, I'm uncomfortable thinking about all this."

Byleth frowned. "Why?"

"Because…" Claude took a second before finally saying it out loud. "Because I've been thinking about it a lot. It's scary how much I like the idea of dominating you. Not just physically but really staking claim to everything: mind, body, spirit. It makes me feel like some sort of greedy monster."

Claude was almost afraid to look up. To see her reaction might kill him. What if she was horrified, disgusted? What if she'd only pictured a few playful taps on her ass with a crop before things resumed as usual? What if she ceased to want him near her, knowing this?

He glanced up even still and found his wife wide eyed, face red. "What else do you want to do?"

Oh?

"You like that?" He asked.

Byleth shifted in her seat, nodding just the tiniest bit. He could see her flush run down her chest, hiding beneath the powder blue of her royal robes. He wondered if he took them off and tore the corset from her if she would be red all the way down. 

"I think a lot about what it might be like if you were tied up," he admits. 

His eyes narrow when Byleth looks down in her lap. He can see even through her the shadows cast and her hair let down that she is smiling. 

"Like that night on tour in Fherdiad?" She asked. 

"No," he said plainly. "I was thinking something tougher than silk, and not just your wrists. Hard rope, the kind that'll scratch but not too much. Maybe leather bindings."

"What else?"

He hums. "I think about edging you. Not like I do now but for days. I think about what it might be like for you to come to me crying and begging for some relief and the idea of telling you no, of you obeying. Gods, Byleth, it's such a turn on."

"Do you ever think about...punishing me?"

Claude can't help but smirk. "Only if you're a brat."

Byleth's teacup falls to the floor. Porcelain shatters on the Almyran rug and the tea soaks into it. 

"Oops."

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys liked this. I so rarely see the risks and warning signs for domdrop put anywhere in fiction so I wanted to explore it, however lightly, in this while also introducing this series' dynamics to you!


End file.
